by Steven James
The Bishop
( Patrick Bowers files - 4 )
Steven James
The Bishop
Steven James
Prologue
Saturday, May 17
Patuxent River State Park
Southwest Maryland
53 miles north of Washington DC
Spring, but still cold.
9:42 p.m.
Officers Craig Walker and Trevor Meyers rolled to a stop in front of the squat, paint-peeled home of Philip and Jeanne Styles, the only house on the vacant county road winding around the state park.
They exited the cruiser.
A few dogs barked in the distance, but the forest behind the house swallowed most of the night noise, so apart from the muffled shouting coming from inside the home, the evening was silent and dewy and still.
Craig ascended the porch’s crumbling steps, Trevor at his heels. He tried to distinguish the words of the people hollering inside. Tried to catch the gist of the argument.
After a moment Trevor cleared his throat. “Aren’t you gonna knock?” He’d told Craig earlier in the day that he liked to be called Trev, of all things. How nice.
“Easy, Tonto.” Even though Craig had only been on the force five years, he’d already dealt with more than his share of drunk husbands and battered wives. “Domestic disturbance calls are the worst.”
The voices inside were loud but indistinct.
“You been called out here before?”
“No.”
Craig almost told him that he’d heard this guy, Styles, had a history of spousal abuse but then remembered that Trevor-wait, Trev -had been in the car with him when the dispatch call came through.
More shouting from inside the home. Two voices: one male, one female.
Craig opened the screen door and rapped on the wooden one. “Mr. Styles.” He made sure he called loud enough so that anyone in the house would be able to hear. “Sir, open the door. It’s the police.”
“Is that him?” the man inside the house shouted. “That the guy you’ve been-”
“Stop it!” Her voice was shrill, frantic, filled with fear. “Get away from me!”
Craig shouted, louder this time. “Mr. Styles, open the door!”
The man: “Put that down, you-”
Craig Walker unsnapped the leather holster holding his weapon and gave one final warning. “Open the door or we’re coming in!”
The man: “Gimme that thing.”
“Stop!”
And then.
A shotgun blast.
Splitting open the night.
Craig yelled for Trevor to cover the back of the house, cover it now! But then the words were mist and memory and he was only aware of the doorknob in one hand and the familiar feel of his Glock in the other as he threw open the door and swung his gun in front of him.
Stepped inside.
No overhead light, one lamp in the corner. A smoldering fireplace. A plaid couch, a green recliner.
And a woman on the other side of the room, trembling, shaking. A Stoeger 12-gauge over-under shotgun in her hands.
Craig leveled his weapon at her. “Put down the gun!”
A man was lying on the floor six feet from her, his chest soaked with blood, his feet twitching sporadically. He coughed and then tried to speak, but the words were garbled and moist and Craig knew what that meant.
“Ma’am! Put down the shotgun!” Craig had never drawn on a woman before and felt his hands shake slightly.
She wore a pink housecoat. Her face was smeared with tears. She did not lower the gun.
“He was gonna kill me.” They were frantic, breathless words. “I know he was this time-he said he was gonna kill me.”
The man on the floor sputtered something unintelligible and then stopped making sounds altogether.
Where’s Trevor!
“Put it on the floor, Mrs. Styles. Slowly. Do it now.”
At last, staring at the man she’d shot, she began to lower the shotgun. “He hit me. He was gonna kill me.”
“Okay,” Craig said, “now set down the gun.”
She bent over, a shiver running through her. “This wasn’t the first time.” She let the gun slip from her hands. It dropped with an uneven thud onto the brown, threadbare carpet. “He liked to hit me. He said he was gonna kill me this time. I know…” Her words seemed to come from someplace far away. Shock. Already washing through her.
“Ma’am, you need to step away from the gun.”
“The gun went off.” She stood slowly. “I didn’t want to hurt him, but it just went off.” She took two unsteady steps backward.
“Is there anyone else in the house?”
She shook her head.
As she backed up, Craig, weapon still drawn, carefully approached the gunshot victim to see if the man still had a pulse.
But as he bent down, the woman shrieked and he glanced at her for a fraction of a second, only that much-a tiny instant-but that was all it took.
By the time he’d looked back at the body, the man had rolled toward the shotgun, snatched it from the floor, and aimed it at his chest.
And fired.
The impact of the bird shot sent Craig reeling, tumbling against the couch. He tried to raise his hand to fire his own weapon, but his arm wouldn’t obey. The room dimmed, and for one thin moment he was aware of all of his dreams and memories, running together, merging, collecting, descending into one final regret for all the things that he would leave forever undone.
And then, all of his thoughts folded in on themselves, dropping into a deep and final oblivion, and Officer Craig Walker crumpled motionless and dead onto the tattered carpet beside the plaid sofa in Philip and Jeanne Styles’s living room.
She saw the man she’d fallen in love with, the man she’d stuck with through everything, the man whose baby she was carrying, pull the trigger.
Shoot the officer.
Rise to his feet.
Swing the gun to his hip.
Then she heard the smack of the back door banging open and saw him pivot and fire at a second cop.
This cop managed to pull the trigger and shoot a hole in the floor beside his foot as he dropped in an awkward heap against the wall, dead by the time he landed. The pellets had hit him in the face, but you couldn’t tell it had ever been a face. All that remained was a blur of blood and tooth and splintered bone.
She looked away.
And into the eyes of the man who had just murdered the two police officers. She hadn’t told him about the baby yet; for some reason that was what she thought of at that moment. The tiny life growing inside her.
Her heart hammered. The colors of everything in the room seemed to cut through the air with a distinctiveness she could barely understand.
He hadn’t bothered to lower the barrel, and it was pointed at her stomach. At the baby.
“So,” he said softly.
She took a ragged breath. “So.”
And then.
He set down the gun.
She stared at it for a long moment, then spoke unsteadily, with words brushed bright with adrenaline, “That was close. The second one almost had time to aim.”
“Yes,” he said. “He did.”
Then the man, who was most certainly not Philip Styles, and had not been shot in the chest at all, began to wipe his prints from the gun’s stock, forestock, and trigger.
And Astrid, the name she’d chosen for herself when she’d started this hobby, shed the housecoat and stuffed it into the duffel bag she’d hidden earlier in the front closet.
“You did well,” she said.
“Thank you.”
She was wearing only a bra and panties now. And as she bent over, out of the corner of her eye, she not
iced her man, who called himself Brad, watching her. Even though she was about thirteen weeks along, she hadn’t really begun to show, and she’d kept herself in shape, so at twenty-nine it felt good to still be able to distract him while she was changing. She took her time rummaging through the bag, then slowly stood and pulled on her jeans, a sweatshirt, and a pair of latex gloves.
At last he looked away, toward the window. “How long do you think we have?”
“Less than five minutes. I’d say.” She gestured toward the kitchen. “Let’s make the call.”
The body of the real Jeanne Styles lay sprawled haphazardly in a pool of dark blood on the well-worn linoleum floor near the fridge. As Astrid walked toward the counter where Jeanne’s purse lay, a tawny cat, shy but curious, entered the room, and Astrid gently stroked its back. The cat arched its body and purred in a gentle and familiar way.
“Good kitty.” A soft moment, warm and alive. Maternal in its tenderness.
She scratched the cat’s forehead, then picked up the dead woman’s purse. Rummaged through it. Found the cell, turned on the speaker so that Brad could hear. Tapped in 911.
A male voice answered, speaking in autopilot. “Emergency services. How may I-”
She interrupted, her voice high, hysterical, “They’re dead! They’re both dead! Oh my God, the cops. He shot ’em, he-”
“Who? Who’s dead?”
“He’s gonna kill me. My husband is! Oh he’s-”
The sharp echo of the gunshot blast cut her off, and she let the phone clatter to the floor as Brad put another round of shot into Jeanne Styles’s corpse.
“Ma’am?” His voice sharper now. Concerned. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
Actually, no. I’m dead, Astrid thought. Hurt is a whole different thing.
She slid backward, away from the dead woman, toward the living room, but she could still hear the dispatcher.
“Ma’am?” The man’s voice caught, a growing sense of dread in each word. “Are you there?”
As she left to meet Brad in the next room, she realized that the dispatcher would probably still be talking to the woman’s corpse when the cops arrived, still asking if she was all right.
Astrid was struck by the tragic and delicious irony of it all.
Talking to the dead. Hoping for a reply.
Hurt is a whole different thing.
The cat, now less hesitant, followed her.
Brad was changing into his own clothes. He’d placed Philip Styles’s gunshot residue-covered clothes on the edge of the fireplace so they would smolder but not be consumed by the embers. At least not before the next wave of authorities arrived.
This time she and Brad were not using explosives or a fire to destroy evidence. This time they were leaving carefully arranged clues behind. Clues they wanted found.
Astrid glanced out the window and saw a pair of headlights appear at the end of the long, winding driveway.
Brad followed her gaze. “Philip,” he said nervously. “I didn’t expect him so-”
“We need to leave.” She gestured toward the couch. “Don’t forget the duffel bag.”
Brad collected their things, and she walked to the hallway where the second cop lay slumped against the blood-spattered wall.
The cat strolled beside her, rubbed against her leg.
As Brad stepped past her to leave, Astrid bent beside the body. She held out her hand to show the cat that she meant no harm. “Come here.”
After a moment’s hesitation, the cat padded toward her, trusting her, and she set it gently on the dead cop’s chest. “There you go.” She stood back, and the cat began to lick the red smear that used to be the police officer’s face.
“Good kitty.”
It purred.
She petted it once more and then joined Brad outside.
The air felt clean, brisk, invigorating.
Astrid closed her eyes and listened to the delicate, invisible chatter of crickets, the soft hum of distant traffic, the emerging wail of sirens.
More cops on the way to the house. “And so they fled into the cool, Maryland night as the man who was about to find the three bodies entered the house.”
She heard the words as if they were being read by an actor on one of the audio novels she liked to listen to while commuting to work. Then Brad spoke to her from the edge of the forest. “I wish we could stay.”
She opened her eyes. The headlights from the car were halfway up the driveway.
“Just once,” Brad went on. “To watch when the police arrive. To see their faces.”
“It’s too much of a risk.”
“I know. But just once. To watch.”
She handed him silence.
“I’m just saying, it would be nice.” He sounded slightly defeated now, and she enjoyed the fact that she could control him so easily, steer his emotions up or down as she pleased…
But on the other hand, she had to admit that it would be nice to watch. “I’ll see if I can come up with a way,” she told him.
That seemed to satisfy him. He waited for her to lead him along the trail. He followed her obediently, through the forest, toward their waiting car. Within a matter of minutes the officers would find Philip Styles in the kitchen, leaning over the body of his wife. The young mechanic would be arrested and, in time, tried and then convicted of three murders he didn’t commit. Another perfect crime.
As Astrid led Brad deeper into the woods, she considered all that they had just accomplished.
Police find what they expect to find, and since nearly 75 percent of murdered women are killed by their husbands or lovers, the cops wouldn’t bother to look any further than the plethora of physical evidence: two 911 calls from a frantic housewife, Philip’s blood-spattered clothes hastily tossed into the fireplace, his gun-the murder weapon-conveniently wiped of prints, and even, in a very real sense, a witness: the emergency services dispatcher who heard the final shot right after the woman said that her husband was going to kill her.
It wasn’t a mountain of evidence, but it was more than law enforcement gets for most crimes. Along with Philip Styles’s history of drug abuse and domestic violence, it would be more than enough.
It was no mistake that she and Brad had chosen Maryland for this crime. The state still had the death penalty.
Since Philip would never be able to afford a competent lawyer, and his overworked, underpaid state-appointed attorney would almost certainly encourage him to plead out rather than go to trial and face the needle, the best he could hope for was life without the possibility of parole. And that’s just what she’d wanted, because, for her, it was even more satisfying sending them to prison than watching them die. Because then the power she had over them never went away. Just grew stronger with time.
To think.
To think that by wearing a pink housecoat, firing a gun into the wall, and making two 911 calls she’d orchestrated sewing shut the rest of Philip’s life.
Ten years, thirty, fifty, however long he might survive.
The thrill of controlling someone else’s destiny so completely, so absolutely, was intoxicating, overwhelming.
Arousing.
She paused and faced Brad, pulled him close, and kissed him deeply, letting her hand trail along the ragged scars that covered his neck and left cheek. They were deep and discolored and seemed to frighten most people, but she had always acted as if they didn’t bother her, and perhaps that was one of the reasons he was so obedient to her-he believed that she accepted him as is. Something all human beings desire.
Within the hour they would find a place to make love, and it would be as good as it was each time when the game was over, but tonight she didn’t want to wait. She let one hand slide down his back and explore his firm, toned body.
He gently eased away from her. “We should get out of the woods first.”
She caught the double meaning of his words and smiled. Get out of the woods first. Yes. Brad, the cautious one.
She kissed
him one final time, and then led him down the trail toward the car that she’d hot-wired earlier when she borrowed it from a DC Metro parking lot.
When they reached the edge of the forest, he said, “I’ve been thinking.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve got an idea for the next one. Something we should try.”
They arrived at the car.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
It might be nice to let him plan one; at least to hear what he had to say. “Well, then, I’m all ears.” And then, the loving couple left to find a furtive place to consummate the evening, and she listened attentively as her partner, in both crime and love, outlined his idea for the next perfect night they would spend together. The next perfect date. Game number five.
1
Two weeks later
Saturday, May 31
St. Ambrose Church
Chicago, Illinois
6:36 p.m.
Dr. Calvin Werjonic’s body lay grim and still in a lonely casket at the front of the church. I stood in line, nine people away from him, waiting for my chance to pay my last respects to my friend.
The air in the church tasted of dust and dead hymns.
Having spent six years as a homicide detective and the last nine as an FBI criminologist, I’ve investigated hundreds of homicides, but I’ve never been able to look at corpses with clinical objectivity. Every time I see one, I think of the fragility of life. The thin line that separates the living from the dead-the flux of a moment, the breadth of eternity contained in the single delicate beat of a heart.
And I remember the times I’ve had to tell family members that we’d found their loved ones, but that “their condition had proved to be fatal,” that “we’d arrived too late to save them,” or that “we’d done all we could but they didn’t make it.” Carefully worded platitudes to dull the blow.
Platitudes that don’t work.
On all too many prime-time crime shows when investigators arrive at a scene and observe the body, they crack jokes about it, prod at it like a piece of meat. Cut to commercial.
But that’s not the way it is in real life.
